Oral-Formulaic Theory: Annotated Bibliography

Samuel G. Armistead. "Epic and Ballad: A Traditionalist Perspective." Olifant: A Publication of the Société Rencesvals, American-Canadian Branch, 8:376-88.

Counters the individualist view of separate, learned traditions of epic and ballad with a traditionalist exposition: "In the Hispanic world, epic and ballad constitute a single system of oral, traditional poetry, extending from the epic's remote and unknown origins, in an uninterrupted continuum, down to the twentieth-century tradition of the Romancero" (384). Sees the epic as essentially an oral genre with a complex variety of influences: learned, hagiographic; French, Germanic, Arabic, and Latin. Feels that an understanding of the oral-written interaction should be substituted for polemics.
Area: HI, FB, CP